One Man's Nightmare is Another Man's Treasure
by SomniumofLight
Summary: Once, a lonely little girl stumbled across a studio in the dark, and the creature that lived within. Now, twenty years later, she wakes up from a memory of childhood imaginings that lead her back to the abandoned place – only to find that her so-called "childhood imaginings" were far from imaginary. (Rated T for horror elements and language. Eventual hurt/comfort stuff, maybe.)
1. Dreamlike Memories

**New updated version of chapters one through two are here! Plot's more or less the same for both of them, it's just some details that have been altered, but still might be a good idea to read them anyway... never know when a small detail will be important later on ;P**

* * *

In every city on the planet, there is a place whose lights have long since gone out, or where lights never glowed in the first place.

Sometimes this place is an empty lot, nothing save flat dirt and concrete. Sometimes it is an office building set for demolition. Sometimes it's an abandoned warehouse, empty save for dust and old crates and the occasional homeless man making himself at home for the night.

In this particular city, in this particular place so easily shadowed by the gleaming light bulbs and towering skyscrapers of downtown that lie in the distance, it is not a warehouse, nor an office, nor an empty lot. Here, a dilapidated structure sits, almost measly in comparison to the steel and glass grandeur of it's distant neighbors. It's hard to tell exactly what this place may have been – there's nowhere near enough radiance here to see anything save a shape in the dark mist of this wet night – but it is small and squat, with only two stories, and what little space it seems to cover is taken up by a shape that is less than uniform.

Then, there is a light. It's a very small light, a dim beam breaking through murk to alight upon one wall, miraculously clear of graffiti, and the corner of a window, clouded by dust and covered by thick wooden boards. When we follow the beam, we find it to originate from a flashlight, held in a small, trembling hand, and if we look closer, we find the owner of that hand to be a girl.

She is a young girl, and very thin and gangly, not even old enough to have grown into her own limbs yet. Round eyes barely reflect light back at us, and are an indiscernible hue, and the rest of her is equally ambiguous, the nighttime painting her figure in monochrome, but we can see a short bob of dark hair, mussed and tangled, loose pajamas, and what seem to be slippers on her feet. She is not dressed for a foray into the ruins of the modern world, unless the mostly empty drawstring bag she is clutching to her chest hides a hammer, prybar, lockpick, or grappling hook.

But this girl does not seem to care, and as she approaches the building, we see her wipe something away from her eyes, and hear a sniffle. She is crying, and mumbling a child's equivalents of profanity in a meek little voice that pierces the darkness about as well as her flickering flashlight. The noises are soft, muffled and almost inaudible, just like her footsteps as she walks around the building's perimeter, looking for something.

She finds what she was looking for in the form of a door. Unlike the other openings into the building that we can see, this door was clearly boarded up in a hurry, the wooden strips crooked and poorly fastened. The girl sets down her light to tug on one board, and it comes off in her hands after a few strong pulls. She removes each board, the occasional sniff the only interruption, until the door is uncovered, and she pulls it open with a creak, releasing stale air into the world.

The inside of the building is darker than the outside, the bulbs hanging from the ceiling having been switched off long ago, but the flashlight picks out a short hall, adorned with posters, and a room beyond, and after a long moment, the girl walks inside.

The interior is not large enough for her footsteps to echo. Beyond the short stretch of entrance hall, the room we caught a glimpse from outside is fairly wide, but any flat surfaces that sound may bounce off of is severely hindered by the clutter of furniture. Tables stand along the wall, with tilted surfaces and sporting old abandoned drawings that match the figures from the posters, a projector sits abandoned, and film reels sit quiet on the wall. Above the girl's head, strange black pipes shine with the dull gleam of dusty glass, drips of dark liquid staining the wall beneath a crack in the curved surface.

The girl stands for a moment, eyes wide in surprise – or perhaps wonder – at the room before her, temporarily distracted from her earlier disquiet.

"This looks like an artist's studio," she murmurs. When nothing save silence responds, she slowly picks her way across the room to the projector, and, after a moment, turns it on. There is still a film mounted, and it plays animated figures across the wall – one short and chubby with horns, one tall and even ganglier than her with a snout. The animation loops over and over, and after a long few moments of staring, her eyes gleaming with reluctant enthusiasm, the girl shakes her head and murmurs denial of something in her own mind before switching the projector back off again, along with the oddly distorted music it played.

She turns it off in time to hear sounds. Overhead the pipes are creaking, making strange noises, and the soft drip of black liquid from one of many pipes has become a thick, viscous ooze down one wall.

"Hello?" She calls. No one calls back, but the creaking seems to retreat down the hall to the right of the door, and so she follows it, holding fast to her light as if it were a lifeline.

The sounds die. She follows the pipes, regardless, through a little winding hallway adorned by yet more tilting desks and cut-outs of one of the characters from the animation, past a chart on the wall, until she turns around yet another corner and finds herself standing in the strangest room she's ever seen – huge, vaulted, stacked high with shelves and barrels, the floor sunken into the ground as if a shallow sinkhole had opened below it. In the middle of the room, lit by the faintest beams of moonlight filtering through the slats of a window high up the wall across from her, a yawning pit pierced the floorboards, decorated only with massive chains descending into the dark abyss below.

"I wonder what this room is for…?" she mutters. There is, of course, no answer, and with a shake of her head, the little girl turns around to go back the way she came, tension beginning to ebb out of her body.

It returns abruptly when a quiet sound reaches her ears – the sound of pattering, oddly wet footsteps, from the hallway ahead of her. She freezes.

"H-hello?" She calls again, nervously. Her flashlight trembles in her hand, and with similarly quaking legs she takes a hesitant step forward.

She turns a corner, and something dark and shiny darts across her vision. The little girl shrieks, dropping her flashlight, and it rolls away to thump lightly against the wall, painting her in too-bright light and casting everything around her into even deeper shadows.

From that deep darkness, there is what is most definitely a _snicker,_ and the girl shudders.

"W-who's there?" She whispers. When there is no immediate response, she slowly inches forward, reaching down to reclaim her flashlight.

And just as her fingers close on the little device, there is the most quiet of noises just behind her, and something snatches her bag away with a cackle.

"H-hey!" She whips around to find nothing save a rapidly disappearing blob of black, bubbling goo on the wall behind her. Heart pounding wildly, she snatches up her flashlight and scours the floor for her bag, only to find that it, just like that odd vertical puddle, has also vanished. Visibly upset by this, she drags in a shuddering breath, biting her lip to stop it from wobbling and squeezing her eyes shut.

Then there are more pattering footsteps, and her head whips around in time for another black blur – or perhaps the same one – to race across her vision. She yelps, leaping back, and in the dim glow she watches in astonishment as the blur, smaller than even she is, disappears into yet another vertical puddle along with the faintest flash of periwinkle blue – the same color as her bag.

"H-HEY!" She shouts, shockingly loud. "Give t-that BACK!

A familiar snicker echoes somewhere in the darkness, the sound as oddly wet as the footsteps, and the little girl whips around, brandishing her flashlight like a weapon in trembling fingers.

"This isn't funny!" She cries. "G-give me back my bag!"

"Pfff, _nah."_

The gurgling voice catches her completely by surprise, and with another shriek she whirls around, her flashlight beam slicing through the dust in the air and then settling like a very dim flashlight on a small, dripping figure, standing in the middle of the hall like it had always been there – a small dripping figure that this little girl, as young as she is, knows shouldn't exist anywhere but on the silver screen.

The black and white creature grins – actually, it's more of a smirk. "What'sa matter? Never seen a cartoon before?"

The girl stops gawping, and squares her shoulders. "G-give me b-back my bag p-please," she stutters.

The smirk grows wider, and one gloved hand begins twirling the bag around on one finger by the strap, at frankly ridiculous speeds. "Hmmm, hows-about another _nah?_ "

"Please," the little girl repeats, more insistently this time. Pie-cut eyes roll at her… somehow.

"Geez, what's so important about this bag of yours, anyway?" The bag stops twirling, and the creature makes as if to open the bag. The little girl makes a desperate sound and lunges forward before it can, grasping desperately for her belongings only for the being to jump away with a cackle, disappearing into another odd blob of wet that appears and then disappears on the wall.

"Ha, you got some fire in you! What's in the bag, girlie?"

The girl stiffens. "N-nothing important!"

"Aw. c'mon, there's _gotta_ be something important in here, way you're acting!"

"T-there isn't! Give it back!"

There's a dissatisfied hum, and then a rustling of fabric. The girl looks even more desperate now.

"D-don't! There's n-nothing in there to look at!"

A snort, and then the sound of paper rustling instead of cloth. "A sketchbook 'aint _nothing,_ don'cha think?"

"D-don't look at it! Put it b-back!"

The voice doesn't answer again for a long few moments, save another hum, and then there's the sound of ripping paper. The girl shrieks.

"Geeze Louise, relax! I just tore out a page, that's all."

The creature drops seemingly from nowhere, landing with a sploosh in front of the little girl again, and holds out her bag and the sketchbook that was inside of it. The book's cover and the bag are both liberally smeared with black handprints, fingerprints, and drip marks, but otherwise seem unblemished.

Slowly, the girl reaches out to take her stuff back, only for them to be tugged back before she can.

"Nuh-uh-uh!" A finger wags at her mockingly. "I wanna know what's so important about this sketchbook of yours first! Don't get me wrong, your drawings are great, but are they really that important?"

And with that, the girl suddenly stops looking so upset and simply looks… shocked. Shocked and vulnerable, almost heartbreakingly so.

"You t-think t-they're… great? You… you don't t-think they're a waste of time?"

"Pssh!" The white hand waves airily. "'Course not! Who told'ya _that_ load of baloney?"

She does not answer, and after a moment, the creature's mischievous smile twists into something that looks a little more painful.

"Soooo, 'ya gonna tell me what that's all about, or do I have to keep this?"

* * *

It's not certain how long they have been talking, the girl and the strange creature that drips black onto the floor. It has been a long time, that much is certain, for the girl's eyes have dried and, though she still stutters, she seems strangely at ease at her unusual companion's presence, despite the earlier conflict between the two. Her bag having been retrieved, the girl is smiling, though shyly, and sometimes laughs at something the creature says or does. The creature itself seems cheerful, over-exuberant in a way that only a cartoon character can truly pull off, but if one looks closely, one can see a fine vibration of tension in the way it moves, the way it smiles.

When, finally, the girl gets up to leave, clutching her belongings tight against her chest, the being's smile becomes even more strained.

"Hey, where're 'ya going? Don't just walk away from me!"

"I'm sorry," she says, and she seems genuinely sorry, eyes scrunched up with remorse. "But I have to go back h-home."

The creature scrambles after her as she begins to walk, a note of desperation entering it's voice. "B-but you can't just leave! I still haven't told you about that epic prank war I started once!"

"I'm sorry," she says again. "But my p-parents will be worried about me."

"They don't sound like they'd miss 'ya at all!"

"They would," she insists quietly. "And m-my little brother, too. H-he'd miss me."

There is a moment of silence, during which the creature looks around, desperation even more prominent as it seeks some way of convincing the girl to stay. A crinkling of paper catches its attention, and it looks down at the stolen drawing in its hand before looking up at the girl again. Its smile warps, twisting down into a frown. It's not even bothering to pretend to be cheerful anymore.

"Please?" It tries, and the girl stops, because this creature had yet to use the word _please_ the entire time they had been speaking, and she turned back to see that expression sprawling across it's face. Seeing her eyes get drawn to the paper it holds, it offers it to her with shaking fingers.

"I-I'll give 'ya this back if you stay!"

She stares for a bit longer, hesitating. Then she smiles sadly, reaches out, and gently pushes the paper, and the hand holding it, back towards the creature.

"Keep it." She says. "T-that way I have to come back to get it." She holds out one hand, pinky finger extended. "I'll come back. I p-promise."

The creature says nothing for a long time, black eyes wide and pleading, but when the girl's sad expression doesn't change, it looks away –

 **And the world glows** ** _red._**

 **"Liar." it growls, the paper crumpling in its hand, viscous black pulsing in time to some eldritch heartbeat.** ** _"You never came back."_**

* * *

With a swirl of color, the dream that was also a memory popped like a bubble.

* * *

In a low-slung bed in a small apartment, a woman with dark eyes and hair that now sports a myriad array of colored streaks bolts awake. She lays there for a moment, looking up at the ceiling of her room, limbs flung out in a sprawling tangle across her mattress and hair falling into her blinking eyes. For a moment she seems confused – then the details of the strange dream of childhood imaginings come rushing back, her eyes widen, and she leaps out of her bed and dashes across the narrow hall to her roommate's door.

She bangs on it, hard, once, twice, and calls through the wood to the possibly listening ears beyond, until the door creaks open a fraction, and bleary eyes blink at her.

"What?"

She grins, a look of practiced mischief twenty years in the making.

"I've found a place for our studio," she says.


	2. Enter Miri

**My interpretations of the BATIM characters – Bendy, Boris, Henry, Joey Drew, etc – are only just that: interpretations. They are NOT canon to the actual game or the history of the world it takes place in (or at least I don't think they are). This is just me having fun! ^^**

* * *

If one were to ask anybody who had made the acquaintance of one Miriam "Miri" Besnick just what sort of woman she was, the answer you would receive would differ depending just who you asked.

If you were to ask her parents, they would tell you she was a rapscallion, a fool working towards a career bound to crash and burn, and bemoan how her teenage rebellion phase had started early, and then never ended.

If you were to ask her younger brother, he would either turn his nose up at the mention of her (whenever their parents were around), or declare with a huge grin that she was the coolest person on the face of the planet, even if she was a girl, and he wanted to be just like her when he grew up (when they weren't).

If you were to ask the professors at the art college she had attended, they would tell you she was a bit too quick to curse, but hardworking and easily one of the most dedicated students on campus.

If you were to ask her close-knit group of oddball friends, they would tell you she was one of the most strangely likable assholes they'd ever met in their lives, and would seem torn about whether or not they should curse themselves for having ever met the woman.

And if you were to ask Miri herself? Well, she would give you an impish grin, agree that yes, she _was_ an asshole, then jerk a finger at herself and proclaim, with great pride and puffing out her chest, that not only was she an asshole, but she was also _an animator._

Miri had her reasons for being so prideful of being, as one of her pals would put it, the "artsy-fartsy" sort. She had grown up in your typical high-end middle-class household, her father being a respected surgeon who saved lives almost on a day-to-day basis, and her mother a respectable woman who toiled day and night as a tailor, and whose skills with a needle and threat were always in demand. Upon being old enough to read, both of Miri's _so-very-respectable_ parental units began trying to groom her into a successful little businesswoman, cramming lessons about various fields of study down her throat, along with their opinions of what constituted an "acceptable" job.

Unfortunately, at least in the eyes of her parents, Miri showed no interest in being a lawyer, tailor, secretary, or any other high-end, high-profit jobs that her gene donors wanted her to take an interest in. Instead, her interests had diverged long ago and gone down an entirely different path – the path of pen and paper, pencils and paints, the path of art. Fantastical characters, wondrous landscapes, fairies and unicorns – Miri drew them all, and the more she created, the more fascinated she became with it – until, one day, the dark-haired little girl she'd been had innocently asked her parents if she could make drawing her job.

Her father had immediately railed into her with an intensity that frightened the little girl out of her boots, and thus things had begun on a downwards spiral. Argument after argument, scolding and lectures – her mother and father simply refused to put up with the notion that their little girl might want to make a living as a "glorified finger-painter" instead of any career they personally recommended. And with every harsh word, Miri retreated further and further into her sketchbooks whenever she could, until one day her father decided to dump every last one of them she could find into the fireplace to make his point, and Miri fled crying into the night with a bag of what few art supplies she still had to her name.

She returned the next morning with her bag stained liberally with ink that refused to be washed out and subtly… different. She paid attention to their lectures, bit her tongue whenever they railed on her favorite hobby, and she kept quiet until her parents finally decided one day that she must have taken their words to heart, and started to go easier on her.

Needless to say, this was _not_ the case. While little Miri obligingly read the books that were shoved upon her, and never seemed to buy new supplies to replace the ones her father had burned… well, if there was one thing that _all_ the Besnicks were, it was stubborn, and Miri had inherited a double dosage of that stubbornness. She saved up her allowance one penny at a time, buying art supplies on the sly and bribing her little brother to hide them in his room. Only when her parents were out of the house did she retrieve them and draw as she wanted to, and when she did, gone were the girly stick-figures, and what was in their place was rubberhose cartoon characters.

Then, one fateful day almost eight months after that night she'd run off into the dark, Miri finally decided enough was enough, hid every last one of her meagre art supplies at her friend's house, and then irreparably shattered her parents' toxic hopes at the dinner table with one trembling but determined sentence.

"I'm going to make cartoons when I grow up!"

After that, the girl made it very, very clear that she no longer had any intentions of listening to her parents. She walked out on their lectures, threw away the books they tried to shove down her throat, and locked herself in her room in an effort to ignore her parents' ire. As she got older, and her posse of social rejects and weirdos slowly grew around her, thus giving her the support she needed, she became more daring in her rebellion. She walked out of the debate club her parents tried to sign her up for in favor of the art club where she was free to doodle her cartoons to her heart's content. She liberally splattered all of her "respectable" clothes with colorful paints and inks, and doodled on everything that wasn't splattered on. She created comic strips for the school newspaper, signed herself up for an animation class taught by a visiting animator. As her parents tried harder and harder to crack down on her behavior, so did Miri increase her own efforts not to be silenced. She painted her walls with images of a cartoon paradise, skipped classes to graffiti local buildings with her peers, posted mocking caricatures of her parents all over the house, and even helped her brother start learning to draw on the side, just to spite the two close-minded members of their family.

This never-ending war of attrition finally culminated in an eardrum-shattering shouting match, Miri vandalizing every last piece of clothing in her parents' wardrobes, and several buckets of neon paint being tipped over on top of her parents' heads. Needless to say, Miri was kicked out in short order, the last words she heard from her parents in years being "don't come back until you start working towards a _real_ career."

Miri had then proceeded to flip the metaphorical bird at _that_ statement by moving in with one of her friends, saving up money for art school, and then graduating with a masters degree with all A's, before beginning to crank out as many handmade comic strips and cartoons as she could whenever she wasn't working as a waitress at a local restaurant.

Obviously, she had yet to go back, though sometimes her roommate, one Briar Kern, wished that she _had._

Take now, for instance.

* * *

For the fourth time in as many days, Briar was woken up by what sounded like someone trying to cave in his bedroom door with a battering ram.

"Hey, Briar!" Miri shouted. "Wake up, get dressed, get your coffee, we've got places to go!"

"Go?" He repeated blearily before burying his face in his pillow again. "It's too early to _go_. Lemme sleep."

On the other side of the door, hair pulled up in a messy ponytail, Miri rolled her eyes, pushed her glasses further up her nose, and kept knocking furiously until she heard a loud groan from inside the room, and her unfortunate roommate finally flung it open and gave her his best early morning glare.

His glare wasn't very intimidating, mostly because he couldn't seem to focus on her face for long enough to make eye contact.

"There we go!" Miri shoved a cup of coffee into his hand. "Now drink, and be ready to go in fifteen, otherwise I'm getting one of those kiddie leashes to _drag_ you with."

The next fifteen minutes were a blur as Miri half stalked, half-dragged her friend around their tiny apartment, idly threatening everything from the coffee maker to Briar's very comfortable pillow in order to motivate him, until finally the man was stumbling about mostly dressed, and Miri bodily dragged him out the door and into the early morning sunshine.

By the time they were on the bus on their way to their unknown destination, Briar was awake and thoroughly regretting his choice in friends.

"So why exactly did you drag me out of bed at _ungodly o'clock in the morning?"_ He demanded.

Miri grinned, leaning back, crossing her arms over her paint-splattered dress, and tapping a jaunty little rhythm against the bus's metal floor with her clunky combat boots. She seemed more amused at his displeasure than anything else – an unfortunately common occurrence after she'd developed her by now infamous mischievous streak when she was fourteen.

"What, you mean you're _not_ an early bird? Why, I've been wrong about you for all these years, Briar dear!" Miri chirped.

"Cut the crap," Briar groaned, burying his face in his hands. "Where are we _going?"_

"Remember what I told you four days ago about remembering a place for that studio we've been wanting?"

He blinked at her. "… No?"

She snorted. "Yeah, yeah, I know, you didn't get your true love's first kiss yet. The point is, I told you about it." She leaned forward, clapping her hands together and positively _beaming_ at her blonde roommate – an expression that was incredibly disturbing to anyone used to her usual smirks and snark. "Well, _that's_ where we're going right now!"

Briar blinked slowly at her. Then he groaned again. "You're telling me you woke me up at this torturous hour because you wanted to have a _house tour?"_

"Hey, firstly, it'd be a _studio tour,_ " Miri chided, her usual smirk returning. "Secondly, it's less of a tour and more like we're inviting ourselves in to have a look."

"What?"

"Well, it's not like the owner _wants_ people poking their noses in," Miri shrugged casually, and Briar opened and shut his mouth like a fish a few times as he slowly realized that _Miri intended for them to break into someone's probably private property._ "So we might as well show ourselves around." She patted the black-and-periwinkle bag slung over her shoulder. "I managed to get Corvus to snatch us a copy of the blueprints of the place – it's why I didn't insist we poke around sooner, 'cause it took him _ages_ to find them. Buried _real_ deep down in the filing cabinets, if you get my drift."

"Miri. _Miri._ _Please_ don't tell me you bribed Corvus into _stealing classified files from the police,_ 'cause that's what it sounds like you did."

"Aww, c'mon, have a little faith in me, Briar Rose." Miri waved her hand dismissively. "I asked Alan first, but he couldn't find anything in the town hall – someone moved the blueprints. Not sure why they were in the _police evidence lockup_ of all places, but hey, we have them now, don't we?"

"One of these days you're gonna get us sent straight to jail. We're going to end up on _death row_ because of you."

"Ah, the everlasting trust of two bestest buddies," she mused. " _Relax,_ Briar, we'll be fine. This was probably just someone from the police department playing a prank on someone, or deciding to be an ass, or both. Nothing dangerous – Corvus checked to make sure there were no big red exclamation marks to be had about this place, and apart from some skittish land owners claiming the place is haunted, nothing much is going on."

 _"Haunted?"_

Miri rolled her eyes. " _Relax,_ Sleeping Beauty. I checked with Jenn yesterday morning – she's done her research and apart from some weird disappearances a decade or so back, this place is clean of any suspicious activity, supernatural or otherwise. No-one's even been in this place for _years."_

Briar narrowed his eyes at her, deeply suspicious. "If this place is abandoned, then why the _hell_ are we going there?"

With a grin, Miri reached for her drawstring pouch. Briar immediately leaned back, eyeing the little bag with trepidation.

Now, as laughable as it might have seemed to be wary of a drawstring pouch, every member of Miri's troupe of friends would vouch for having a very healthy, and slightly fearful, respect for that little ink-splattered bag. Miri claimed to have had it since she was ten, and always carried it with her, and as a result the entire group had borne witness to countless examples of the sheer impossibleness of what it was capable of carrying. While what the bag typically carried was normal, everyday objects, the _number_ of things that it could carry was beyond what the laws of physics dictated the bag should be capable of carrying – and sometimes, Miri would fit the most ridiculous of items into the thing that had no business fitting inside, the most memorable occasion being when she'd pulled not only her usual lipsticks, pencils, and sketchbooks out of the bag, but also a three-inch thick hardbound book that the bag frankly shouldn't have had enough room for.

There was _no way_ that little bag could carry so much, they had all agreed after the fourth time such a thing had happened, without it having something supernatural involved. In fact, they had so much faith that there was something supernatural involved that they had actually started a number of betting pools over the years – what was causing this strange phenomenon, what all Miri could fit inside of it without the bag splitting at the seams; someone had even bet once that Miri would one day pull a chainsaw out of the damn thing.

Luckily for Briar's nerves (and his wallet, since he'd bet _against_ the chainsaw), Miri only pulled a folder of papers out of it today, and began rifling through them.

"I looked this place up the same day I remembered it," she told him cheerfully. "This place used to be an animation firm – Joey Drew Studios. They were in direct competition with Ross & Seegson during that glorious golden age of rubber-hose cartoons and wacky hammerspace physics. Mister Joey Drew himself was a real piece of work, started off as your typical kindly old man that goes on and on about dreaming and believing in yourself, and then went a little off the deep end after he somehow got into an accident in his own studio. No-one's one-hundred percent sure what exactly happened, but he was known to cut a lot of corners, so it might have been because of that. My bet is a beam falling on his head or something."

"Great," Briar groused.

Miri shushed him. "The adult's still talking, Rosie-dear."

"You're the farthest thing from being an adult on the face of the entire planet."

She shushed him again and continued. "Anyway, he cut a lot of corners, had an accident, and while he was in the hospital recovering from whatever happened the place went bankrupt. After a few years of trying to get the studio back off the ground again, he gave up and sold the place to the highest bidder. That guy lost his nerves somewhere along the way and decided that the place was haunted, and sold it to the next highest bidder, and then _that_ guy had to deal with those disappearances ten years back or so, and shoved it onto the guy that owns it now."

"Great..." Briar groaned, putting his head back in his hands. He looked downright miserable. "Just great. You're taking us into a place where a spook might live. Why do I let you get away with this kind of crap, Miri?"

"Because you love me and would live a horrible no-good life without me being there for you?" Miri crooned sarcastically, wriggling her eyebrows. "Anyway, I already said Jenn checked this place out, remember? No supernatural activity, just a regular old abandoned building."

"Has she ever, you know, _physically gone there to check?"_

Miri shrugged. "Nope!"

"So this place _might actually be haunted?"_

"Oh, man up, princess." Miri leaned across the aisle and slapped his knee playfully. "Having a haunted studio would be _awesome_."

"Says you. _I_ actually have _some_ sense of self-preservation left."

"Aw, c'mon, we both know that you'd totally fangirl over a ghost if you met one. Besides," she added, a shit-eating smirk stretching across her lips, "no real ghost could match the kind of horrors _your_ brain comes up with at dark o'clock at night. Or did you forget about that little story you came up with where –"

"I was sleep deprived and I thought we agreed never to talk about that again," he interrupted her hurriedly.

"Pssh. _You_ agreed never to talk about it again, _I_ never agreed to _anything."_

 _"Miri!"_

* * *

The property that now belonged to the two aspiring animators wasn't all that impressive. It sat in the middle of a quiet suburban neighborhood, a semi-abandoned looking lot that might have once been a parking lot, but was now nothing more than a garden of weeds surrounding a small building. The building itself wasn't exactly impressive either – it was only a single story tall, and, unlike in that odd dream-memory that Miri only partially remembered, it was _covered_ in graffiti. Admittedly, most of the graffiti was a pretty cool-looking sort of graffiti, with a very low ratio of cuss words to pictures, unlike most walls that people emptied their spray cans on, but that was pretty much the only impressive thing about it, save the sheer quantity of wooden boards nailed over every visible window and door and the enormous faded billboard on the roof.

"Wow," Briar deadpanned, now considerably more awake than he'd been on the bus. "What a place. It looks _fantastic."_

"Oh, shut it." Miri shoved him, smirking at the scowl he shot in her direction, and then opened her folder of files and deftly removed several folded-up blueprints from between a few other pages. "Sure, it's a fixer-upper, but it could be worse, and it's the inside we're more worried about right now, right?" She unfolded the blueprints, scanning the drawings quickly.

"Okay, we've got some supply closets, some offices… and if I'm remembering correctly, there's still a bunch of equipment left inside. Some radios, some old drawing tables and projectors…"

She grabbed her roommate's hand, and, nose still buried in the closest things to maps her friends been able to find, dragged her increasingly put-out pal after her. "Looks like there's a couple of basement levels, too… oooh, a music department! Complete with an orchestra pit! We should call in Anna when we're done here, see if she wants to help us out. And it looks like there might be a black room, too… some offices…"

They turned a corner, and there stood an unblocked door. _The_ door from Miri's dream, some of the nails from the boards still stuck in the frame.

Miri snickered. "Aww man, nobody even boarded up the door after me? That's pretty irresponsible of them."

"… you've been here before?"

She shrugged. "Broke in here after an argument with my parents. Probably made up half of what I 'remember' bout it, though. I don't think inky hellhole pits are actually a thing, after all."

"… will we even be able to get in?"

Still grinning, she strode forward, and easily pulled open the door, revealing a dark, dusty interior without a single lit light bulb in sight. It also let out a veritable blast of air with the distinct, pungent scent of rubber ink.

"Ta-da!" she said cheerfully.

She reached into her bag and pulled out a huge, bulky flashlight, taking a distinct satisfaction in how Briar's face scrunched up in that familiar "that shouldn't be possible" expression that always appeared when something big came out of the bag, and flicked it on, revealing scores of dust drifting in the air in the wake of the first breeze this place had felt in years, and a short hall lined with vaguely familiar posters, faded and unreadable with age. A small room was visible beyond it, though just barely – the dust in the air was so thick, and the room so dark, that it was difficult to see through, but she could make out what was probably a chair, and maybe a corner of that old projector – just like the one from her dream.

Miri took in a deep breath, unbothered by the inky stench and ignoring the odd skip in her heartbeat, and stepped into what had once served as a childhood sanctuary with a spring in her step.

* * *

 **I was originally planning to make this story take place in a more modern setting. The temptation to make Miri a snarky paid-by commission YouTuber was almost too strong, plus there were interesting scenarios involving Bendy and photo-bombing/skype-call-bombing that could have been entertaining.**

 **In the end I kept Miri's personality, but made the time period closer to sometime in the 70s, with less technology and more of an old(ish)-timey feel. It's not going to be accurate to that time period, mind – I haven't done any real research – but rather something like a fusion between that decade and modern day, with some more modern slang and sensibilities alongside some more old-fashioned characteristics. That being said, I probably should do some actual research…**

 **(EDIT: Chapter's been updated!)**


	3. Moving Pictures

**Oh my god, what is this? Is this a new chapter, or a miracle? *thinks for a moment* Let's go with both. Anyway, yeah, NEW CHAPTER GUYS! Sorry that it took so long to update, but it's FINALLY HERE NOW. Without further ado, please enjoy OMNIAMT Chapter 3: Moving Pictures!**

* * *

The building's interior barely seemed to have changed at all _._

Of course, this is generally true of abandoned buildings that have been, well, _abandoned_ for several decades, especially those that were kept in relatively decent condition before their abandonment. The man who had the building built may have kept cutting far too many corners, but the old studio was still more than sturdy enough for it to have barely changed in the past twenty years.. The old furniture was still there – tilted artist's tables decorated with splotches of ink and old drawings, an old projector sitting despondently in a corner, film reels mounted on the wall, and strange black pipes looping in and out of the walls, dripping black gunk down wooden panels and onto the floor beneath them. The only things that seemed different was the flickering light bulb overhead – there had been no lights at all in Miri's recollections – a cardboard cutout a cartoon character – _a demon of some kind, maybe? It had the horns for it if nothing else_ – leaning up against the wall next to the projector, and the sheer quantity of ink splattered across the walls and floors.

Speaking of ink, judging by the soft sploosh and the disgusted groan behind Miri as she advanced forward, Briar had just stepped in a big ole' puddle of the stuff.

"Oh _yuck._ Miri, why the hell is there _ink_ everywhere?"

The woman snickered, turning about on one heel to face her erstwhile roommate. "Aww, what's the matter? Don't like getting your feet wet?"

"Shut up," Briar scowled, hurriedly removing himself from the puddle and shaking off each foot one at a time, sending little sprays of black splattering across the floor. "And you didn't answer my question, _why the hell is there ink everywhere?"_

With another snort at her friend's expense, Miri jabbed a finger up, directing the man's attention to one of the many pipes near the ceiling. His incredulous expression, once he registered what he was looking at, was _priceless._

"Who would make pipes for _ink?"_

She shrugged, and turned her attention back to the room, walking up to one of the tables to scoop up one of the drawings and study it. "I remember that stuff being here when I came here as a kid. I think it was that Joey Drew guy, he made some weird purchases before this place went under." She put the drawing back down and skipped a few steps over to the projector, flicking it on to see if it worked. It did – but whatever film was loaded looked like it was long since too damaged to play, and the music that started warbling was discordant and kept skipping notes. "Man, this thing has seen better days… too bad, I wanted to see if that animation was something I imagined or not…"

Briar squelched over. "I'm not surprised it's not working, what with all the _ink everywhere."_

Miri rolled her eyes and shoved him. "Oh shut up about the ink, princess." She turned back towards the door, spotting the entrance to a hallway as she did. "C'mon, let's go see what's down here."

Ignoring her friend's grumbling behind her, Miri skipped down the hall – the very short hall. Really, it was more like a glorified cubbyhole, barely a few meters long and ending in a small nook and an open doorway. The nook in question was more like an indent in the wall, barely large enough for an old desk to be crammed in there up against the wall, along with another cutout of the demon character and a poster on the wall. This poster, unlike the ones in the entrance hall, was actually legible, showing an image of a cartoony gloved hand and finally giving a name to the impishly grinning cutouts.

"Bendy, huh?" She mused. "I feel like they missed out on a lot of references they could've made with this little guy, naming him something like that…"

Her voice trailed off and she squinted at the poster. "Little" guy? The cutouts were almost as tall as she was, where on earth had she gotten that idea from? And for some reason, the name "Bendy" felt… familiar. And the familiarity felt strangely disquieting.

She shook her head, dismissing the odd feeling. Honestly, she's probably thought that because all of the round, squat characters in cartoons tended to be shorter than the others. No need to think too deeply into it.

Odd moment of thought over with, she turned and shone her flashlight into the room that opened up behind her. When she followed the beam of light through the door, she found herself standing on a squat balcony overlooking the rest of the room beyond. Several light tables lay scattered around the room, the lights on and oddly bright in the gloom. Most of the tables were bare, save for some ink splatters, though there was one up against the wall with an ink well and a drawing still on it – a drawing of Bendy with his gloved hands covering his mouth. A poster reading "Work Hard, Work Happy" had been posted on the wall above _that_ desk, and Miri made a face at it.

"That is one creepy poster," she said.

Briar, having finally gotten over the squick factor of the ink on his shoes, snorted and edged around her into the room. "As if you know what 'creepy' actually looks like."

"Well then, mister horror-genre aficionado, would _you_ say it's creepy?"

Briar opened his mouth – then he paused, considered the poster, and after a long moment of thought, shrugged, not able to come up with anything that could contradict Miri's verdict. She rolled her eyes and, their little debate now over with, turned to scan the rest of the room. A stroll around the floor nearly had her tripping over several overturned chairs and lead to her discovering a stack of unfinished storyboards inside the drawer of a desk – she snatched those to read later – and a boarded-up bathroom that had lost its door a long time ago and had been liberally splattered with yet more ink from the pipes above. By the looks of it, there was a _massive_ leak in the ceiling too, because there were drops of ink dripping down into the toilet bowl at a steady pace.

"Ew," Briar grimaced. "Uh, note to self, clean out the toilets before using them."

"What, you don't want inky toilet seat prints on your rear?" She asked cheekily. "Shame, they'd really suit you."

Briar scowled and gave her the middle finger. With a snicker, she turned back towards the door, pausing only for a moment to scan the room once more – and taking a double-take when looking at the table with the drawing, because hadn't that little demon had his hands over his mouth? Apparently not – before going on her merry way back up the stairs and then down the hall. After all, they still had an entirely different hall and loads of locked and boarded up rooms to explore, and that was just on _this_ floor and not the basements underneath.

Though, Miri reminded herself as the floor creaked dangerously underfoot, she wasn't going to do _any_ exploring down there until the upper floor had been fixed and they would no longer be in any danger of having the ceiling collapse on top of them. She wasn't stupid, no matter what Briar would say if he knew what she was thinking.

"Alright." She whipped out the blueprints again, scanning them. "Looks like… we were just in the art department. Wow, this place was _tiny._ Did Drew only hire the minimum number of animators he needed or something?"

"Hell if I know," Briar groused. Miri was about to cheerfully retort when a sign in the hallway they were entering caught her attention.

The sign itself wasn't actually all that special. Honestly, it was just a rectangle with four boxes and arrows on it. However, the second entry on the list of locations in the building caught her attention and had her brows drawing together in puzzlement.

"The hell is an _Ink Machine?"_ She wondered. She turned to look at Briar. "Briar, are my glasses faulty or is that actually what it says?"

"Nope, you're reading it right." Her roommate looked somewhere between disgruntled and grudgingly curious. "Maybe it was some sort of in-studio slang for something? A 'come get your ink here' sort of thing? Or…"

There was a pregnant moment of silence. Then, as one, the two explorers tilted their heads back to look up at the pipes adorning the walls. The pipes filled with black liquid, dripping what smelled like _rubber ink_ out of the various cracks and loose joints holding the tubing together.

"… what are the odds, do you think, of these pipes having something to do with this 'machine?'"

"Pretty high odds," Briar mused. Immediately upon turning the next corner, he stopped in his tracks and turned on his heels. "Okay, nope. That's a portent of doom if ever I've seen one, I'm not going down there –"

Miri grabbed the back of his shirt before he could go anywhere, eyeing the wall across from them. Scrawled across the yellowed boards in ink were the dripping, barely readable words _Liars are not welcome here._

"Probably just someone's idea of a joke," she snorted. "C'mon, Rose, you're not _that_ big of a scaredy-cat, are you?" Still dragging the protesting blonde by his shirt, Miri continued down the hall. This corridor was significantly longer than the previous one, without a single cramped cubbyhole to be seen and lined with numerous unlabeled doors. The passage was otherwise featureless save for some supporting pillars along the wall that looked as if they'd been haphazardly slapped on, a few more posters, and what looked to be a segway into another hallway all the way at the end, a small sign hanging from the ceiling and a chart tacked up onto the wall.

"See?" Miri snarked, smirking at her friend. "Not a portent of _anything._ "

"Portents of Doom don't come true immediately," was Briar's response.

She snorted, yanked him forward and then shoved him hard in the back. The man tipped forward with an undignified yelp and face-planted magnificently onto the floor.

"What the hell, Miri?!" He spluttered pushing himself up onto his elbows and glaring at her. He had a _fantastic_ print of the floorboards stamped on his face, thanks to him having landed right in a puddle of ink. "What was that for?"

"I just felt like it."

The glare turned sizzling, and he flipped her the bird again. The woman just laughed, springing nimbly over him and sauntering down the hall. Ignoring the grumbling coming from behind her as Briar pulled himself up to his feet and followed her, she idly jiggled the knob of each door she passed, noting which doors were locked and taking quick peeks at the building blueprints to see what rooms lay behind them. Most of the doors turned out to be locked, and although she could have used the multitude of hairpins she had in her bag to pick the locks, she decided to save that for later, once they'd gotten a better idea of how the main halls were faring. By the time she reached the end of the hall, she'd only found one door that opened, and a quick peek into _that_ room revealed what looked to be some sort of dining hall or break room: there were lots of tables, a few books scattered around, and what looked like a dart board on the wall, plus yet another little devil cutout. Nothing much of interest, so she continued on, stopping in the middle of the hall and looking up at the sign hanging above her head: _Ink Machine_.

"Welp, let's see what this thing's all about," she mused.

"I'm more interested in how much ink these guys were using, thanks," was the expected response. Briar squeezed past her and jabbed a finger at the last entry on the chart. "A machine's a machine, but come on, four hundred and twenty-three gallons? Who needs that much ink?"

Miri grabbed him by his shirt again and dragged him around the corner. "Stop waffling, princess. Seriously, for someone who can handle every slasher fic on the market, the first time you step into a spooky old building, you lose your nerve!" She clicked her tongue mockingly. "Pathetic."

"Shut up," Briar grumbled.

"Never," she retorted cheerfully, turning another corner – then stopped and shut up despite her words, gawping at the room before them as a feeling of deja vu swept over her.

Looming before them, huge and vaulted with rays of sunshine leaking through slats in the boards above their heads, was _the same enormous room from her dream._ The same balcony, the same distant ceiling, and the _very same chains_ dangling into a pit that from this angle seemed to have _no bottom,_ just _thick, inky darkness_. All there, and all _very, very real._

"Holy crap." Her roommate sounded just as stunned as she felt. He snatched the blueprints from her – she didn't protest, too busy stepping up to the balcony's edge to get a better look at the room beyond – and began scanning through them fervently. When the rustling of paper stopped, and Miri glanced over her shoulder, Briar looked incredulous, looking back and forth between the room and the schematics. "Holy _crap._ How the hell is this place not on the blueprints?! It's _huge!"_

Miri shook off the last of her shock with a few quick blinks, and a wide grin nearly split her face in two. "Who cares?! This is _awesome!_ Look at this place!"

Briar's face scrunched up in disbelief. "Miri. _No._ This place is _not awesome._ The ink is just weird, but for all we know that's actually a _bottomless pit_ over there."

Miri was not the least bit dissuaded by this, flouncing over to him and reclaiming the blueprints with her excited grin still firmly in place. "I should've brought some rope along!"

"Even if you did, I wouldn't let you _climb into a bottomless pit just to see what's down there!"_ Briar protested. He grabbed her wrist and started trying to drag her out of the room. "C'mon Miri, let's get out of here, this place is obviously _not natural._ "

"But Briar!" Miri dug her heels into the floor, pulling right back until Briar was unbalanced and nearly tipped over again. "Briar, Briar, Briar, _this is the same room from my dream._ This place is _real!"_ This was _very_ important, it needed to be said! "Do you have any idea how _cool_ that is?! We can't just leave!" She yanked her hand free and turned back around to gawp at the room again – then she spotted something she'd missed the first time around, a switch on the wall half-hidden behind a shelf and what looked like a portable generator of some sort hooked up into the wall. Ignoring Briar's spluttering, she darted over to have a look. The wires to the generator were still exposed, the bright warning red of them glaringly bright in their almost monochrome surroundings, and she quickly followed the wire up the wall with her eyes. It meandered across the ceiling haphazardly, finally ending in what looked to be a massive winch that had been hung in the ceiling – a massive winch connected to the chains dangling into the pit.

 _There was something down there._

Miri's grin grew wider. Noticing the lack of power cells in the generator, she began poking around, hoping that there would be batteries of some sort she could stick in. Briar was still making unhappy noises in the background when she found them tucked away into an old chest, and his protests grew louder when she slotted them into the generator.

"Come _on_ Miri, seriously? This is a _really bad idea!"_

Miri waved dismissively at him. "Real life isn't a slasher flick, princess! We'll be fine!" The batteries in place, she yanked down the switch. With a creak, a dangerous-sounding groan, and a clattering of metal, the chains began to move, slowly pulling whatever was hanging in the pit up. Then something peeked over the rim of the hole, and Miri watched as one of the oddest machines she'd ever seen was hoisted into the light.

It looked, she decided after a moment, like some giant unholy amalgamation of a tea kettle, a faucet, and an old printing press, with bits and bobs of other machines thrown into the mix for good measure. Most of the machine was covered in oddly yellowed metal plating, out of which sprouted a variety of other implements. A large spout at the front that looked as if someone had sawed off the end of some massive sewer pipe, cleaned it out, and bolted it on. Multitudes of gears, still as the grave in their casings. Thick and thin pipes curling around the machine's boxy contour, filled to the brim with black ink sitting stagnant in the glass tubes. A massive tank imbedded in the back, also filled to the brim with ink if the color was any indication. More pipes coming out of the bottom of the tank in a cluster of tubes wide enough to hold a fully-grown man, and long enough that they disappeared into the darkness just as the chains had done. There was even what looked like a _film reel_ mounted on one side of the thing.

The exciting moment was ruined by Briar's shaken and more than a little deadpan "What the actual _fuck."_

Miri whirled away from the machine to beam at him. "I know right? _Look_ at this thing!" She spread her arms wide, gesturing at the mechanical abomination. Honestly, it _did_ look a little like something you'd see in a horror movie, so Briar's protests weren't completely unwarranted, but at the same time, this was _so cool._ No way in hell was she going to let something like this go right when it was starting to get interesting!

"Don't sound _happy_ to see something like this!" Briar yelped. "Miri, whenever something like this turns up in a horror movie, it means _bad things are about to happen._ Come _on,_ it was _hanging in a pit of doom_ for God's sake!"

There was a creaking, then a bang from the pipes over their heads. Miri and Briar both looked up, squinting at the tubes looping in and out of the ceiling, then looked back at each other, Miri still excited and Briar very much the opposite.

"And there's _banging in the pipes,"_ Briar stressed. "We need to get _out_ of here!"

Miri's grin showed more teeth. "No chance in _hell,_ Rosie-dear~"

"God, I was afraid you were going to say that – hey hey hey, wait a second, where are you going?!"

Miri shot a grin over her shoulder as she started turning around the corner into the hall. "I'm going to go see how you turn this thing on!"

"Are you _kidding me?!"_ Briar yelped. He sprinted after her, feet fumbling over one another before he managed to steady himself. "You're going to turn on that abomination?!"

"Obviously!" She chirped, turning another corner into a hallway branching off the original. The secondary hallway quickly turned into a T-junction several meters along, and she paused and considered her options. "Hmm, left or right, do you think?"

"Neither!" Briar insisted. "Let's go back!"

Miri rolled her eyes and turned right. With that, Briar finally gave up trying to convince her, throwing up his hands in exasperated defeat and following her none too eagerly.

"You're going to get us _killed,_ Miri."

"Pssh, am _not._ " She skipped past another Bendy cutout, lit by a flickering bulb hanging over its head, and another drawing desk with drawings scattered across it. "Like I said, life isn't a slasher flick!"

Briar muttered something that sounded suspiciously like _we could be in a thriller instead you know_ , but Miri ignored him again – though, admittedly, because a _bang_ had startled her. A board had fallen from the ceiling in the middle of another T-junction ahead, and Miri took a second to carefully study the ceiling for more falling wood before she turned right, deciding that turning right every time she could was probably the best option in case she got lost.

As it turned out, though, she'd just turned into some sort of dead end. Fortunately, the dead end seemed to be some sort of generator room. The back wall was composed entirely of machinery, pistons and gear boxes and yet more pipes, with a large switch in the middle of it all accompanied by a blinking light that read _Low Pressure,_ and a huge sign hanging over it all reading _Ink Machine Main Power._ Along the other walls, six half-columns or pedestals of some kind stood, connected via more pipes to the walls. On the wall behind each pedestal, picture frames had been hung, depicting black silhouettes. An ink well, a book, a music note, a gear, a wrench… and something that looked a lot like the cardboard cutouts, just a bit more like a teddy bear. A toy, maybe?

"Miri."

"I found a generator of some sort," she announced. She strode forward and tried the switch – and pouted in disappointment when pulling it did nothing. "It's not working…"

" _Miri._ "

The woman paused, finally registering the tone of voice being used. That wasn't Briar's _Miri what the fuck are you doing stop it_ voice. No, it was Briar's _Miri get over here something's really gone to hell_ tone mixed with a healthy dosage of incredulous disgust. Her excitement finally dying a little upon this realization, Miri turned to look over her shoulder at her friend, only to find the blonde man not even paying attention to what she was doing, but instead staring down the other branch of the hall that she hadn't so much as glanced at, his eyes wide.

"What?" She trotted up to him. "Did you see a big 'ole cockroach or some… thing…?"

Her voice trailed off as she turned her head to look at what Briar had found, and she suddenly found herself not able to finish her jibe. At the far end of the narrow corridor before them, another room opened up, and unlike most previous rooms, this one was actually somewhat well lit – well lit by what looked to be candles. The waxy sticks had been arranged in a loose semi-circle near the center of the room.

Not the actual center, though. Because the center of the room had been filled with something that _couldn't possibly be real._ Slowly, as if the air was filled with molasses, Miri walked down the hall, not taking her eyes off of her intended destination. The object in the middle of the room only grew clearer as she approached, more real.

An operating table stood in the middle of the room, tilted back so as to be almost vertical. It was the sort you saw in hospitals (though strangely in the same yellowed tones as the wood of the studio around it), the sort with straps for the wrist and ankles and great big belts looping over the hole thing to hold someone on it. And, suspended by those straps and belts, was a black-and white figure. A figure that, despite being humanoid, had arms that were much too thin, hands that were much too big, legs that were much too tubular, and a head far too _doglike_ to be human. And the details only got more odd as she approached – each eye of the strange figure was a cartoonish "x," ink stains splattered all over the overalls the figure was wearing, almost like blood stains… and it's chest had been _peeled open_ , leaving nothing but a _pit_ where there should have been organs and white ribs _sticking out of_ the black surface.

"What the hell _is_ this…?" Briar murmured behind her as she stopped, eyes still fixed on the macabre… decoration? This wasn't actually a real creature, right? It looked too fake for that, but…

"Some sort of fucked-up Halloween decoration someone left up before this place closed down?" she offered meekly. Gingerly, she reached up and poked the thing in the doglike nose -

\- only to pull her finger back sharpish and gag, because _holy fuck_ that had felt _wrong._ The thing may have looked fake as all hell, too textureless, but it didn't _feel_ textureless. That nose had felt like it had _actual skin._ No longer the least bit excited, Miri took a step back.

"It's _gotta_ be just a decoration," she whispered. She looked around quickly, half-expecting some old douche to come popping out of a hidden compartment in the wall and go _psyche, I fooled you kids but good didn't I,_ but no, no such luck. In fact, the room seemed pretty much bare. Just a crate, an old desk, a chair and a toolbox, plus a poster of the _same creature as what was on the operating table_ on the wall… and another smeared message in ink.

 _Leave him alone!_

Miri swallowed.

"Briar?" She whispered. "I think we should get out of here now."

If Briar was surprised at the change of heart, or the uncharacteristically meek words, he didn't say anything. She heard him start back down the hall at a dead run, and she turned to follow him.

 **A tiny black figure stood in the middle of the hallway, dripping black and surrounded by pulsing veins of shadow that spread across the floor**

She shook her head, a headache pulsing behind her eyes for a moment, then took off after him.

* * *

Obviously, as you may have guessed, getting out of that decrepit old studio was hardly going to be that easy. When Miri caught up to her companion, she found Briar desperately trying the doorknob, rattling it and even bracing his foot against the door in an attempt to pull it open. Nothing he was trying so far was working.

"Miri, the door's locked!" He said as soon as she stopped behind him. "Got a crowbar in that amazing bag of yours? _Please_ say yes."

The woman fixed a smirk – a touch more forced than usual, understandable considering the circumstances – on her face. "Oh _please,_ princess, I've got something much better than a crowbar." She fished around in her bag and pulled out a hairpin. "Step aside and let me do my thing, won't you?"

Ordinarily, her roommate probably would have protested picking the lock. However, now was not the time for such trivialities of morality, and so he stepped aside without a word and let Miri get to trying to crack the lock. She twisted the pin in her hand and stuck it into the keyhole, jiggling it around searching for the right cogs to turn to unlock the door.

After a few moments, she heard something click, and sighed with relief, reaching up to turn the knob – only for the door to remain stuck firmly shut.

"What the hell?" she said. She yanked on the knob again, and then again, to no avail. "I just _unlocked_ this damn thing, I _heard the lock click!_ You can't just –" With a desperate growl, she kicked the door as hard as she could. It didn't even so much as rattle on its hinges.

"Shit," Briar muttered, wrapping his arms around himself and rocking a little on his feet. "Shit, shit, _shit._ You mean we're _stuck in here?_ " He took a deep breath, obviously trying to calm himself and almost managing it. "God-damn it Miri, I _told you._ I _told you_ you'd get us into big trouble one day, and what do you do? _You go and get us trapped in an abandoned building with no way out!_ "

Miri whirled on him. "Shut up, Briar! There's –" She grimaced and grabbed at her hair, pulling on it. "There's gotta be another way out. There's no way there isn't a back door. There's _gotta_ be a back door, we can try there." She whipped out the blueprints again and began flipping through them frantically, eyes darting over the papers.

There was _no back door_ on the blueprints. God-damn it, _why was there no back door?!_

"No no no, there's gotta be one," she muttered to herself. "There's gotta be a back door, there's gotta, there's _gotta…"_ She took a deep breath of her own, trying to slow her pounding heartbeat.

 _Think, Miri,_ she thought. _We've already seen that there's something that didn't make it onto the blueprints. That room with the machine was_ ** _huge._ **_If something like_ ** _that_ **_never made it onto the paper, then it's possible something as small as a backdoor got left off too._

"We need to search this floor. See if there's another way out." Miraculously, Miri sounded far calmer than she felt, and it looked like the tone was doing wonders for Briar's rising panic, too, because he visibly calmed as well.

"There was another hallway down by the… the power station," he said quietly. "And a bunch of closed doors. Maybe there's an exit behind one of them?"

Miri nodded numbly, and lead the way back down the corridor.

* * *

Of course, finding a back door would be far too easy, wouldn't it? Try as they might, Miri and Briar couldn't find a single door that could be used as an exit. Plenty of closed and boarded-up ones, and a couple of closets they managed to open only for them to be filled with film reels, but no back doors, not even any windows they could use as a secondary escape plan. The only other thing they found down that hall was a small theater, something probably used to show off the finished cartoons to the staff in a last-ditch effort to catch any mistakes with the animation or music – a theater which had another switch, like the one from the main power room, sprouting out of the wall and labeled _Flow_. Unfortunately, pulling it did nothing, and Miri was actually starting to feel claustrophobic in this old studio. It seemed they were well and truly _trapped,_ with no way out.

"We could break down the doors to one of the offices?" She suggested desperately, when they'd searched every door they could… which wasn't many. She'd picked up what looked like tape recorder of some sort on the way back, too, though that was less important. "There's gotta be windows in there, right? No way people wouldn't want big windows to look outside."

"I don't think we'd be able to break then down," Briar said uncertainly.

"We have to _try_ , don't we?"

They did try, but again, it was to no avail. They threw themselves at so many office doors that their shoulders started to become sore, and finally had to stop before they started getting more than just bruises.

"God-damn it," Miri growled, beginning to pace frantically. Wood creaked underfoot, but she was far from caring if the floor collapsed under her at this point. "What kind of person doesn't have a back door? What kind of person blocks up all the escape routes in a place like this? What kind of person leaves cartoonish _dead bodies_ around for people to find?!" She stopped in the middle of the floor and tried to calm down. It was hard, though, especially since whenever she closed her eyes she kept seeing that cartoonish dog – wolf? Canine of some sort – corpse on the inside of her lids.

"There's got to be _something_ we can do," Briar muttered, crossing his arms and frowning worriedly.

"Nothing we've tried has worked!"

"So we find another way."

" _You're_ awfully calm all of a sudden, mister!"

Briar grimaced. "Panicking never helps in the movies. Just because there's no monster here chasing us doesn't mean we can afford to let fear take over."

Miri grimaced too. Unfortunately, Briar had a point. But still, _what else could she do but panic?_ They had no way out, no other solutions in sight!

 **The world glitched, and a tiny figure stood before her in a puddle of its own ink, holding a tape recorder in its hands**

Miri blinked as a thought occurred to her. Slowly, she looked down at her bag, where she'd stored the tape recorder she'd found earlier.

 _Well,_ she thought, _nothing to lose._ She pulled the little machine out, and, after fumbling with it for a moment, pressed the play button.

 _"At this point, I don't get what Joey's plan is for this company,"_ said a tinny, youthful voice. _"The animations sure aren't being finished on time anymore, and I certainly don't see why we need this…_ ** _machine._ **_It's noisy, it's messy, and who needs that much ink anyway? Also, get this, Joey had us each donate something from our workstations. We put them on these little pedestals in the breaker room. To help appease the gods, Joey says. Keep things going. I think he's lost his mind, but hey, he writes the checks. But I tell you what, if one more of these pipes burst, I'm outta here!"_

The recording ended, and for a long moment, Miri stared at the recorder in her hands. Then, slowly, she felt a kind of desperate hope, and looked up at Briar with wide eyes.

"Pedestals." She said. "They put things on the pedestals in the power room – and there were pictures of objects in frames behind them. A music note, an ink well, a book, a gear, a wrench… some sort of toy?"

Briar grimaced. "This sounds like the beginning of some satanic ritual."

Miri ignored him, starting to pace again. "An ink well… wait, I saw one of those in the art department! And a gear… there was one in the chest where the power cells were in the machine's room!"

"Miri –"

"There was a Bendy plushie in the theater!" Miri interrupted. "And – books in that dining hall. Music… what's music? And I haven't seen a wrench around…"

Briar sighed, but apparently decided that if you couldn't beat them, you joined them, and he thought long and hard for a moment.

"… I saw a record next to the old projector in the entrance hall," he offered finally. "Maybe that's what the music note is for?"

Miri nodded. "Maybe… maybe!" She turned sharply back down the hall to the theater. "I'll get the plushie! You start working on the other stuff!"

It said a lot about their current situation that Briar didn't make some sort of comment about splitting up being a bad idea. He just nodded and turned down a separate hallway.

Miri made quick time down the hall and retrieved the plushie. It squeaked like a dog toy when she grabbed it, and she paused and gave it a few more squeezes in an effort to calm down. Then, feeling a little better now that she was doing something, even if it was, frankly, a little crazy – what could a plushie do to turn on the power, for heaven's sake – she turned back down the hall and raced back the way she came. She stumbled across Briar as he left the dining hall, a gear and a book titled _The Illusion of Living_ tucked under each arm.

"Inkwell and record next?" He asked. Miri nodded and hurried to the front entrance. Briar found the record under the chair the projector was propped up on easily, and Miri continued on her way to the art department, making a beeline for the desk with the inkwell. She paused when she saw that the Bendy picture was in a completely different position than it was before – he definitely hadn't been lying on his side before, what the hell – and then high-tailed it out of there just a little faster than when she'd come in. Bad enough being stuck in this old place, the last thing she needed to think about was whether it was haunted or not!

"We got everything except the wrench," Briar said when he met her outside. "You see a wrench anywhere?"

Miri shook her head, thinking frantically. Wrench, wrench… where would a wrench be in this place?

Then she suddenly remembered the toolbox on the ground in front of that dead dog creature, and shuddered. _Oh God…_

"There was – there was a toolbox in the room with the… the corpse." She said quietly.

"… You seem pretty sure it's a corpse?"

Miri glared at him. "Briar, _its nose felt like it had actual skin._ "

He went green. "… Alright. Um, how about… you get the items we already got to the pedestals, and I get the toolbox?"

She nearly sighed with relief. Thank _god._ She'd be happy to never see that room ever again.

Back down the halls they raced, and they split ways at the corridor, Briar dumping the gear, book, and record in her arms before he went. Miri entered the power room -

 **\- The black figure stood up on its toes, pushing a plushie onto the pedestal before the appropriate picture**

\- shook off the sudden headache, and gingerly set the plushie down on the pedestal in front of the appropriate picture. To her surprise, and relief, a light flickered on above the pedestal, shining down like a spotlight onto the little thing. Hurriedly, Miri placed the rest of the objects on the pedestals, and Briar came rushing in with the toolbox, flipping it open. Thankfully, there _was_ a wrench in there, and the last object went on its pedestal with little aplomb as Miri practically flew across the room and pulled down the switch.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then, the blinking light next to the switch flickered, the words changing to _Adjusting Flow_ and then to _On_ , and the room went dark. A distant mechanical whirring, and a dull thump, echoed through the studio.

"It… actually worked?" Briar wondered out loud, disbelievingly. "That actually _worked?"_

Miri whooped, feeling so incredibly relieved. "Maybe the door will be open now?! I mean, the button said it was on low power before – that had to have done _something,_ right?"

"Uh…"

"Come on!" Miri took off running, barely noticing Briar yelp and give chase. She bolted back down the halls they way they'd come in, reaching the main hall before the Ink Machine room –

 **The tiny inky figure stood before the ink output chart, black pools gathering around it, drawing inwards, and sinking into its skin as it grew larger and larger**

Miri stopped. Turned her head to look at the hall to the machine.

"Miri?" Briar whispered. Then a sound made them freeze.

A raspy, gurgling _breath,_ like someone was sucking water into their lungs instead of air. And the sound was coming from the _Ink Machine room._

Slowly, Miri took a step forward.

"Miri, _wait!"_ Briar hissed. He looked around frantically and then followed her. "Miri, slasher movies 101, you don't walk towards the creepy breathing!"

Miri turned the corner. The mechanical whirring in the background had become a dull mechanical thumping, and now ink was beginning to gush from cracks in the pipes.

And the entrance to the machine's room had been boarded up.

Miri stared. She hadn't heard any banging that could suggest these boards going up. And she couldn't see any nails, either. It was as if the boards had just… haphazardly grown out of the walls to cover the entrance.

"What the _fuck?"_ She muttered.

Then – a low, gurgling _growl_. From the other side of the boards. Miri had only a moment for eyes to widen before something _lunged_ at her through the gap in the wood, a dark blur of a hand, twisted and malformed, grabbing for her. Miri shrieked like a little girl (she would forever deny it, no matter what Briar said later), and leaped back, smacking right into an equally shocked Briar. Shell-shocked, she watched the grotesque hand grope at the air where she'd been, and then flip around and scrabble for a handhold on the boards. It found one, after a long moment… and then a head dripping with ink appeared in-between the boards.

A round, cartoonish head. Topped with curved horns. Sloughing off so much ink that the stuff was covering whatever eyes the creature may have had. And a familiar, scribbled-on looking mouth twisted into a cartoonish and oddly vibrating _snarl_ underneath that curtain of ink.

It was the sight of that twitching mouth that snapped Miri out of her shock. She grabbed Briar's wrist and _bolted_ as, around them, the pipes began to burst and rain down showers of ink onto their heads.

" _What the hell was that?!"_ Briar screeched, well and truly panicked now.

Something behind them crashed, and an unearthly rattling _shriek_ bounced off the walls.

"Don't care, just _run!"_ She screamed back. They tore around the corner, sprinting head-long into the entrance hall. To Miri's utter relief, it looked like the front entrance had _actually opened_. Their gambit had worked, even if it had released some sort of – some sort of ink monster on them!

Another shriek, and the final, catastrophic crash of wooden boards turning into splinters echoed through the building. As one being, Miri and Briar sprang for the front entrance.

Unfortunately, yet again, escape was not that easy. With all the ink pouring down on them and pooling across the floor, and the cries of that impossible creature flicking every panic switch in their brains, Miri and Briar had forgotten something crucial. The studio may have been more intact than any abandoned building had any right to be, and the floor may have been sturdy when they came in – but with the added weight of gallons upon gallons of ink resting on top of it, what they'd deemed as only a slightly suspicious creaking patch of wooden boards finally gave out.

And so, instead of making their escape, the duo fell with the screech of that unnatural beast their only other company into the depths.

* * *

 **I had so much fun writing this chapter once I got back the inspiration for it, you have no idea, guys. Especially Miri, like god-damn I forgot how fun she is to write - and the princess jokes she started cracking only made it better. Seriously, why didn't I have her start calling Briar a princess sooner, it's PERFECT.**

 **Briar is the genre-savvy one of this dynamic duo. He's an avid consumer of horror media (which, considering the time period this fic takes place in, is mostly limited to slasher fics in movie theaters and books), which means he knows a lot of the tropes that have to do with said horror media, and will be the first of the two to realize that something's wrong and that they need to run. Miri, on the other hand, once she gets over her initial panic, will be the one of the duo that tries to kick the asses of everything that gets in their way and actually succeeds... most of the time. Bendy's gonna throw her through a loop whenever he turns up since he's p much invincible and all that. Invincible AND smarter than that last descriptor of him as a "beast" would imply, so this is gonna be FUN.**

 **An interesting little tidbit here: I actually went to the BATIM TVTropes page to look through the tropes there, and decided it would be cool to point out the horror tropes that Briar notices in this chapter. Said tropes are:**

 **Portent of Doom – the writing on the wall falls under this.**

 **Bottomless Pit – the pit the ink machine is in, obviously. We know it's not really bottomless, but Briar doesn't!**

 **Make sure to check out the updated chapters one and two! Thanks for reading, and Bendy will return in Chapter Four: The Old Song!**


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